Sunday, May 14, 2017

Character Creator: run, idle, and animations

I was going to do ears and noses next, but with the new materials, I decided that expanding my character animation base was the most important. After all, I'm going to need to edit the ears to my extra skin tones anyway, and so long as I'm doing graphics work, it makes sense not to go back to add in run functionality afterwards.

Then I decided to add in an idle animation-- head turning and blinking. Not the most exciting stuff, but the occasional blink adds to the movement of the game, I think. Plus, the standing / eyes shut graphic will be great for sleeping characters.

So, today I've added in the new animations into my LPC men's sheets, added an idle animation, recolored the new stuff to fit each of my eleven skin tones, and I've worked out the animator tree in Unity and tested / tweaked the files until they looked good.

Run / idle animations in progress. Notice the blink isn't in on the idle sets.

Finished! All eleven skin tones are in, for adult males. Note that my idle isn't actually a rapid head toss; the animation in Unity is mostly standing, some blinking, and a quick side-to-side, but it only uses those four graphics.

Unity animator, with conditions to tell the system when to play which animation. Tweaks still needed here, but it's coming along.